Meta

To Juice or Not to Juice

By Robyn Stoller, Founder of CancerHawk.com. Originally featured on CancerHawk.com on March 18, 2011.

The National Institute of Cancer says “Serious diseases that are linked to what we eat kill an estimated three out of four Americans each year. These diseases include heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, some types of cancer, and diabetes. Eating a diet that contains 5 to 9 servings of fruits and vegetables a day as part of a healthy, active lifestyle lowers the risk for all of these diseases.” Clearly nutrition (or lack thereof) can have a significant impact on our health.

So one of the first things we wanted to do was increase the amount of fruits and vegetables that Alan consumed. We decided to “juice” because juicing is an easy way to get more fruits and vegetables into your diet. The Stanford Medicine Cancer Center says ”1 cup of carrot or celery juice provides most of the same nutrients found in 5 cups of those same vegetables chopped up”. (BTW, we “juiced” even before we began working with Dr. Luepnitz)

My dear friend Allison ran all over searching for the right juicer. Was it supposed to be a whole food juicer or a juice extractor? I don’t know which type is better but we settled on the juice extractor (mostly because Allison’s sister-in-law had one in her storage closet that we could borrow).

Ask any of my friends… almost every single day we juiced a concoction called “Cruciferous Surprise.” (CAVEAT- The one change we made after meeting Dr. Lwas to eliminate all high-antioxidant foods the day before, the day of & the day after chemo. This is Dr. L’s “3 Day Rule” which meant no juicing, no green tea with SGS, no brightly colored vegetable soups or stews during these 3 days.)

Here’s the recipe: a bunch of kale, a bunch of broccoli, ¼ head of cabbage, one carrot and one small green apple.

Truthfully, it wasn’t horrible… but it didn’t taste that great either. It was fine. To show solidarity, I drank it along side Alan every chance I could. If you have any “juicing” recipes that you’d like to share, please post them. Others can benefit for your knowledge. Thanks!